Getting People to Give a Damn

abuse poster Toronto
In yesterday’s article I prescribed a two-part process for prompting people to change (their beliefs, and/or their behaviours):

  1. find a way to make it easy for them to change, and
  2. find a way to make it real and personal for them so they care about it enough to change.
Two readers protested: “You can’t make people care”. They’re mostly right — you have to wait until they’re ready for what you have to show them, or tell them. But what you can do is inform them, so that, if they would care if they knew, they will.
The best way to inform people depends on what I have called their ‘information behaviour’. Some people respond to stories, while others need to see for themselves. Showing is usually better than telling:
If you’d take the train with me, uptown, thru the misery
Of ghetto streets in morning light, it’s always night.
Take a window seat, put down your Times, you can read between the lines,
Just meet the faces that you meet beyond the window’s pane.

And it might begin to teach you how to give a damn about your fellow man.

Or put your girl to sleep sometime with rats instead of nursery rhymes,
With hunger and your other children by her side,
And wonder if you’ll share your bed with something else which must be fed,
For fear may lie beside you, or it may sleep down the hall.

Come and see how well despair is seasoned by the stifling air,
See your ghetto in the good old sizzling summertime.
Suppose the streets were all on fire, the flames like tempers leaping higher
Suppose you’d lived there all your life, do you think that you would find

That it might begin to reach you why I give a damn about my fellow man;
And it might begin to teach you how to give a damn about your fellow man
But, if what you’re showing is too stark, or perceived to be manipulative (think of the ads for charities that show starving children), it can backfire. Showing someone what they need to see in person is best, but films, photos, music, personal accounts and other stories, and even novels ( e.g. Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael and CM Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello) can be effective ways to inform people in ways that will engage them emotionally and get them to care, and then to change — if the change is not too hard.

Yesterday I gave the example of getting people to care about the cruelty of factory farming by showing films of what goes on inside them, while at the same time inventing wholesome and delicious meat-substitutes that make it easy to become vegetarian (or creating distribution markets for local, organic, free-range farms); the two steps together could bring about the necessary change of eliminating the demand for factory farmed foods.

A woman’s shelter in Toronto is running ads that try to walk the line between grabbing attention and turning people off, featuring pictures and data on the abuse of women, children and seniors. One of them is shown above. The people I’ve talked to are split about whether they ‘work’ or not. These are PETA-style tactics — The real question is whether the hotline telephone number rings more because of them — whether it makes the ‘hard’ behaviour of reporting abuse ‘easy’ enough.
So what’s your favourite cause, and how might you be able to make it real, personal, something that people care about, and easy for people to change? If you can’t think of one, here are some to put your mind to:

  • The need for an effective, patent-centred, equitable, universal healthcare system
  • The need for a self-directed education system, with facilitators and coaches instead of bums-on-chairs lecturers
  • The need for intentional, sustainable, responsible, self-sufficient, car-free communities
  • The need to end the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, Palestine and elsewhere, once and for all
  • The need to give struggling nations back their resources and economic solvency and work with them to create viable nations
  • The need to get people to live radically simpler lives, buying local and responsibly only what they need
  • The need to redistribute wealth within and between nations so that the poor have a chance to lead decent lives
  • The need to quickly reduce greenhouse gases by 90%
  • The need to protect wilderness and biodiversity, in large enough, connected areas to prevent ecosystem collapse
  • The need to end xenophobia, and allow all people the right to live where they want to live
  • The need to smash corporatism, end corporate crime, gerrymandering, political graft and corruption

Answering the question “How can we make these issues real for people who don’t care or can’t relate to them?” is about making it personal. It takes a lot of imagination to do this: Why should someone who’s lived all their lives in a city care about protecting rainforests, other than conceptually and abstractly?

Answering the question “How can we make it easy for people to become part of the solution?” is about innovative thinking. It takes even more imagination to do this. If carbon credits and donations to charity are the best we can do to makeit easy, we are setting ourselves up for failure.

And if we can’t answer these two questions, or believe there is no answer, we are guaranteeing failure.

Thanks to The Toronto Observer for the copy of the poster

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3 Responses to Getting People to Give a Damn

  1. Dave Smith says:

    Responding to both your post on the 60s and this one, if there is one “victory” we 60ers can claim it’s the organic movement. And it used many different sustained efforts over many years to get successful enough that the powers had to step in and begin their inevitable corruptions as they are doing now.1. A few stubborn farmers never switched to chemicals and kept showing they weren’t necessary, such as Walnut Acres. 2. One stubborn SOB started publishing alternative publications promoting organics: Rodale.3. A well-respected researcher pointed out that chemicals were killing nature and would eventually kill us all: Rachel Carson.4. The Vietnam war threatened our cozy little lifestyles and gradually revealed to us young people that if we continued trusting our political leaders we would get our own selves dead.5. If we couldn’t trust our political leaders, could we trust any of our elders in leadership? Our teachers, our preachers? “Wait a minute. This is ALL bullshit.”6. Free universities sprung up and we started teaching each other about health and diet among many other things. 7. Everything questioned resulted in everything changing, some for the better, some for worse. Many temporary political victories (environment, racism, nuclear power), many disasters (drugs, navel gazing). But something we kept our attention on was our food and our water because that was something we could affect every day with our choices, and our choices supported our own health and small local alternatives: natural food stores, small organic farmers, clean water in bottles.Alas, scale, industrialism, monopolies, and government have taken it over now and begun polluting its hard-won victories. Many small farmer friends who remained purists are out of business. One of my companies built to supply small farmers with good hand tools, after changing hands several times, is now owned by America’s largest pesticide distributor. Many of us were forced to make compromises simply to have a decent, challenging life. My god, our local progressive community is split down the middle over a local slaughterhouse. Those who want “local humane animal treatment” and “environmentally friendly meat processing” for our “organic restaurants and small local ranchers” and those who want “no slaughterhouse whatsoever” and “slaughter only on ranches where the animals are raised.” We still love each other though.And nature keeps pushing up and cracking through the concrete. City Repair in Portland takes over intersections and turns them into neighborhood art pieces. Here in our corner of Northern California, young people have joined with us old progressive former hippies to support small local business, sprout neighborhood gardens, and push alternative energy systems. Our local co-op and farmers markets are thriving. Seeing that you, Dave, like me, have much shorter hair and much deeper lines in our faces, we’ve won and few and lost many, but, as that old radical Studs Terkel says, hope dies last… and we ain’t dead yet.I’m looking forward to your book, a practical followup to Small Is Beautiful, I’m sure. It will be timely as our economy begins falling apart, jobs become scarcer, and all of a sudden the youngsters start looking around and begin saying: “Wait a minute. This is ALL bullshit!” -Dave Smith

  2. Can’t miss commenting on the freudian slip – your offering reads “The need for an effective, PATENT-centred, equitable, universal healthcare system.It’s a sick joke!

  3. Ed Diril says:

    > Showing someone what they need to see in person is best, but> films, photos, music, personal accounts and other stories, and > even novels ( e.g. Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael and CM Coetzee’s > Elizabeth Costello) can be effective ways to inform people in > ways that will engage them emotionally and get them to care, and> then to change — if the change is not too hard.Informing people and causing them to care is step one. However,the next step, which is to get them to believe that it is possible to do something about it and bring about change, is even a bigger hurdle.Most of the time, I see that people don’t react to any of this information because they think “I am too small to cause any big changes, so why should I even bother?”. And giving money to a charity does not always translate to “causing change” in people’s minds. They are doing it because it is a “good thing to do”, but do they believe it will really bring about any change?So what can we do to make people realize that they can indeed cause change and how do we actually make it happen? What are the baby steps that each of us can take which will collectively translate into the change we want to bring about?In short, I think the complete equation goes like this:1. We need to know and care (information/awareness)2. We need to believe3. And we need to know what to do at the ‘single person’ level.

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